Pondering Landscapes: A Chat with BLDGBLOG Author Geoff Manaugh

Preflooded Wetlands by Liam Young and Darryl Chen of Tomorrow's Thoughts Today

A few years ago I stumbled upon the fantastic web site BLDGBLOG and have been following it closely ever since.BLDGBLOG is curated by writer Geoff Manaugh and is wonderfully difficult to describe. Geoff explores ideas of the interaction of our designed/built environments with landscapes and natural processes. Geoff kindly took time out of his schedule to sit down and ponder a few questions I had about his work. I hope you enjoy it.

Brian Romans: Your interests are incredibly wide-ranging — sci-fi, history, geology, urban planning, archeology, meteorology, pop culture, art, and, of course, architecture — the list goes on and on. The BLDGBLOG Book, and your blog in general, weaves these seemingly disparate topics together. At the start of a project is your goal to reveal connections through investigation or is it a consequence of your approach? How do you approach a new project?

Geoff Manaugh: It’s definitely both: finding, and sometimes inventing, connections is a huge part of this. Being interested in architecture—in how humans design, use, and inhabit space—means being interested in a mind-boggling range of subjects: archaeology, anthropology, epidemiology, literature, science, even gang warfare, climate change, ancient myths and poetry, science fiction, the mining industry, Hollywood film. For instance, movie set design is often more cutting-edge than whatever new museum or opera house or concert hall today’s architecture critics would have you believe is important, yet spatial concept art produced for movies like Minority Report or Inception, seen by millions of people, is somehow considered a niche interest, irrelevant to architectural history.

It’s precisely the broad-based, multidisciplinary nature of blogging that makes the whole thing worthwhile—the idea that any field of inquiry is only one link away. That’s hugely invigorating. It’s why I like blogging, to be honest, as opposed to writing academic articles or even jotting things down in my own notebook somewhere, and it’s something that deserves to be more widely appreciated. Blogging precisely allows for these links and connections between fields and disciplines to be pushed right up to the foreground, and that’s an amazing thing. We won’t always live in a time where writers have this ability to bring wildly different fields together with such technical ease and breadth of audience outreach.

In any case, with blogging, I’m basically just trying to tie a huge range of things back to the field of architecture. At the end of the day, that’s all it is. To show, for example, that constructing a skyscraper can have plate tectonic implications—the famous example of Taipei 101, one of the world’s tallest buildings and a structure so heavy it supposedly cracked open an otherwise dormant faultline—or to explore the role that 3D printers might someday play not only in the future of the construction industry but in building human settlements on Mars or the moon. Or to re-read the novels of Franz Kafka or Don DeLillo from an architectural perspective, looking at how buildings can establish a mood often more effectively than things like characterization.

Literature, earthquakes, offworld exploration—that’s all part of what it means to discuss architecture today. And bringing all these things together is why architecture blogging is something I enjoy so much. After all, I’m not paid to do it! So I’m not in this for the money.

Romans: One message I got from your book (whether you intended it or not) is that architects and other designers of our built environment could learn a lot from how nature “builds” landscapes. For example, I remember reading somewhere else about how ingenious and efficient the ventilation system is in giant termite mounds. In what ways are architects and urban planners currently looking to nature for ideas?

Manaugh: This is actually happening more and more today, and deliberately so, with design studios now taught around things like biomimicry and biomorphism—how bees build hives, birds build nests, spiders weave webs, and things like that. I’m not always a huge fan of this approach—too often, it assumes that what humans really need now is to live inside giant buildings that look like termite mounds, instead of just using the same complex strategies of ventilation that termites have developed so that we can move air through our buildings more efficiently. A superficial resemblance between a building and a natural form—like a bee’s nest or a lilypad—is exactly that: a superficial resemblance. But it’s still exciting that a huge new range of materials and material behaviors are being incorporated into the world of architectural design.

Actually, I interviewed someone a month or two ago for a short article in Wired UK: Debbie Chachra is a materials scientist at the Olin College of Engineering, outside Boston, and she’s been studying natural plastic—what she calls “bee plastic”—produced by a species of bee native to New England. This plastic has properties—such as a resistance to biodegrading—that make it very interesting for future industrial uses, but, more importantly, it is made without the use of fossil fuels. This means it might someday be a reliable source of non-oil-based plastics—something that will be highly valuable in a world going through peak oil.

So the idea that little bees in New England, forming their own natural plastics, might someday replace part of the global fossil fuel industry is hugely interesting to me—and it’s that type of biomimicry that interests me, far more than watching architecture students design gigantic buildings that look like orchids.

Romans:Another aspect of appreciating what geologic processes can build is the vast amounts of time involved. In what ways do you think that designing and building structures with a deep-time perspective might influence the ultimate outcome of our built environment?

Manaugh: Well, I’d say that understanding weathering is hugely important—thinking about how materials like glass, steel, concrete, vinyl, and so on age over time. Architects frequently whip up these amazingly futuristic renderings of buildings with advanced geometries and shiny new materials, only for the actual buildings then to weather so badly—and so fast—that they look more like something from the 1970s. Which is deeply ironic, I might add, as if the future that architects have designed for us will be outdated the minute it’s built.

But the person who, in my opinion, is doing the most interesting thinking about this sort of stuff right now is actually a geologist based at the University of Leicester, named Jan Zalasiewicz. He wrote a book a few years ago called The Earth After Us—not to be confused with Alan Weisman’s TheWorld Without Us—where he tries to extrapolate 100 million years into the future and to imagine what kind of fossilized, geological presence our present-day cities might have.

Cities constructed on river deltas, like New Orleans, Hanoi, London, and so on, will fossilize, he suggests, whereas cities like Los Angeles will be eroded away entirely, because the ground it’s constructed on is tectonically rising. He suggests that plastics, over the long term, will fossilize similar to organic materials—like fern leaves and tree branches—because of the long-chain hydrocarbons they’re made out of.

In fact, I interviewed him a while back, when his book first came out, and he mentioned that it’s actually the nuclear industry—not the world of architects—that is most committed right now to thinking about how materials will age over geological spans of time. They’re even devising weird new types of glass and lead-aggregate concretes so that they can safely store nuclear waste underground.

But the idea that Manhattan might someday be compressed into a giant fossil, and that it will be buried in marine rock somewhere, is absolutely spine-tingling. What would it be like to be the person who then discovers it? And is that archaeology or paleontology? It’s like those fossilized forests that have been found deep inside coal mines—but imagine now that you instead find the black, sprawling fossils of Shanghai or Moscow, embedded in rocks nearly a mile below the surface of the earth, 99 million years from now.

A fossil forest is discovered in an Illinois coal mine; photo by Layne Kennedy for Smithsonian Magazine

Romans: As I was reading your book I was slapped in the face with the realization that I’ve been using the word “architecture” in my science. A couple decades ago stratigraphers started to use the term “architecture” regularly in the scientific literature to emphasize the spatial complexity of preserved sedimentary deposits (go to Google Scholar and search “stratigraphic architecture” for a sampling.) Discussing the stratigraphic architecture as opposed to just the layering more accurately describes the three-dimensionality. To what extent do you think our understanding of natural processes is influenced by this built-environment analogy in our mind?

Manaugh: Well, the funny thing about “architecture” is that it’s become a metaphor now, used in everything from computer science to psychoanalysis, and from international diplomacy to geology, as you point out. In some ways, I would actually be more interested in seeing how geological metaphors are transposed onto the city—even onto specific buildings. The idea that New York or London has strata—not streets or sewers—or that every building has its own stratigraphy, is, at the very least, poetic, but it might also help us to understand the vertical layers of the city in new ways.

A fossilized cassette tape by Christopher Locke

Romans: In early 2010 you taught a design studio at Columbia University called “Glacier / Island / Storm” where you aimed to look at how these natural processes and forms might be re-designed. When I saw your talk in San Francisco in March 2010 you mentioned this project, but it was still in progress. Now that it’s finished and you can reflect a bit, what interesting conclusions, thoughts, or ideas came out of it?

Manaugh: That class was a lot of fun! As you say, we looked at large-scale natural processes, trying to see if architects could intervene in, or learn from, the way glaciers, islands, and weather systems form. Where do these structures and systems come from, what causes them, how do they persist through time, and can architects learn to design in similar ways?

We looked at a lot of specific examples. For the glacier part of the studio, we really focused on this fascinating vernacular tradition of “growing” glaciers in the Himalayas, where large blocks of snow and ice are artificially cultivated outdoors, in shaded valleys, to function as sources of freshwater during drought years. The idea was that, if villagers in the Himalayas can basically construct artificial glaciers, albeit on a small scale, with little or no funding and without the use of advanced machinery, then what could trained architects do with the same ideas? We looked a bunch of hypothetical scenarios—for instance, what if the Los Angeles water department someday decided to grow artificial glaciers in the Rocky Mountains in order to guarantee an adequate water supply for the city? Here, the architectural part of this investigation was not just designing a giant block of snow, but coming up with the harvesting, cultivation, and storage infrastructures that this sort of undertaking would require. We also looked at other speculative ideas, like using artificial glaciers to cool server farms, and we came up with this dystopian idea that a financial firm, like Goldman Sachs, hoping to corner the global market in water futures, might someday build itself a vast, artificial glacier reserve somewhere on a secret plot of land in Canada, and thus dictate the price of freshwater. It was that sort of thing—it was somewhere between whimsical science fiction and the practical design of future water infrastructures.

For the island part, we mostly looked at artificial reefs, with a specific focus on this stuff called Biorock. We had marine biologist Thomas Goreau—the co-inventor of Biorock—come down to New York and give us a one-day seminar on how to build with this material. Basically, Biorock uses underwater cages of metal rebar charged with a very weak electrical current in order to precipitate calcium carbonate out of the ocean—so it’s basically an artificial limestone mine, grown on metal scaffolding in the ocean. Given time, though, Biorock grows harder than concrete and, done right, it can serve as the foundation for a future marine ecosystem. So we looked at how architects could construct whole archipelagoes and reefs out of this stuff, and we read things like the U.N. international law of the sea to understand the possible geopolitical implications that large-scale island-growth projects might have. After all, what if you could just grow new nations into existence? It’s like James Bond meets Jacques Cousteau.

Cloud seeding (via Wikipedia)

Finally, for the storm part of the studio, we looked at the bizarre but totally fascinating history of weather control. We had historian James Fleming come down from Colby College to tell us about his research into things like militarized cloud-seeding projects during the Vietnam War and Beijing’s attempt to control the weather during the 2008 Summer Olympics. What if cities can someday control their skies, turning weather itself into a kind of on-demand urban infrastructure? What are the environmental implications of this, the insurance implications, the philosophical implications? What effects might weather control have on house prices?

I had a great time, to be honest; I had ten fantastic students, many of whom I’m still in touch with, and we saw and learned and talked about a huge amount of interesting things. Having said that, though, if I were to do the course again, I would definitely spread it out over the course of a full academic year—there was simply too much to squeeze into one semester—or I might even just cut it down to only one topic: glacier, island, or storm. I would teach it again in a heartbeat, though; for good or for bad, these sorts of quasi-natural design investigations are going to play more and more of a role in architectural design. Rachel Armstrong, for instance, an architect and TED Fellow based in London, has been looking into artificial reef biotechnology for a surreal and beautiful project that she says could help save Venice from sinking into the sea .

We’re going to see more and more stuff like this, and architects should be prepared to apply their design thinking to these emerging fields—like I say, for good or for bad.

Romans: Last month you organized a 10-day “super-workshop” investigating how landscapes, and our perceptions of them, can be transformed by architecture, technology, and design. You are also curating an upcoming exhibition at the Nevada Museum of Art (and editing a companion book) called Landscape Futures: Instruments, Devices, and Architectural Inventions, which explores similar themes. Can you talk a bit about what came out of the super-workshop and how it relates to the upcoming exhibition?

Manaugh: Yeah, that was a lot of fun, too. The basic idea behind the super-workshop was that it was a kind of big, international teaching experiment, bringing together students and faculty from Columbia University, the Bartlett School of Architecture in London, and the Arid Lands Institute in Burbank, California, to explore a cluster of related themes. Many of those people, in turn, will be exhibiting in the Landscape Futures exhibition, showing brand new work there, so it was also an attempt to kick-start an open conversation amongst the exhibition participants—hopefully to create a sense of camaraderie and shared research, and thus to amplify and sharpen the focus of the final work.

Broadly speaking, the overall idea is to look at how the landscapes around us—natural and artificial, urban and geologic, aquatic, terrestrial, and atmospheric—are interpreted, filtered, or otherwise augmented by instruments, devices, and machines. So this is everything from seismographs, ground-penetrating radar, and Geiger counters to naval sonar networks and spy satellites—how do those change the way we understand the planet? The exhibition puts all this into the context of landscape architecture and architecture more broadly—all the way up to the scale of infrastructure—and we’re looking at what artists and architects can design that would further transform how we understand and interact with the landscape.

For instance, during the super-workshop we took a field trip up to Caltech, where we met with Joel Burdick, head of the robotics lab there; he showed us an amazing series of prototypes that his lab has developed for the robotic exploration of other planets. To put this in terms of art, these semi-autonomous robots, armed with cameras and sensors, are the next generation of landscape photographers; they’re relaying back imagery of absolutely sublime landscapes, the sight of which is unprecedented in human history. Seen in this light, NASA’s Mars Rovers are sort of like the Hudson River School of their time.

A survey of debris basin geometries in Los Angeles, assembed by Friends of the Pleistocene using GoogleEarth

One other thing we did on the super-workshop that I think you would have really liked was an epic, all-day tour of debris basins up in the mountains on the edge of Los Angeles. Debris basins are basically just huge dams and reservoirs that are kept empty year-round, so that when landslides and debris flows occur—which is quite often here, after heavy rains—the rocks and mud collect inside these basins, instead of destroying homes and neighborhoods. They’re basically spatial buffers, protecting the city from its own geology. It was great, though, because, at one of the basins, we got an introduction to how the system works, both physically and administratively, from an Army Corps of Engineers site manager. He explained the geology of the region, and how the Corps knows when landslides are coming and what parts of the hillsides might be unstable, and what to do when a stationary landscape suddenly becomes dynamic, and so on.

In the specific context of the Landscape Futures exhibition, then, you could say that these debris basins, both individually and as a system, in tandem with the various soil sensors and survey instruments used to test the solidity of the mountains, would be a “device” or spatial “mechanism” through which our interaction with the landscape is filtered.

In any case, the exhibition opens in August up at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno, so if any of your readers want to explore more of these ideas—where art, architecture, geology, landscape, and mechanical invention overlap—there should be a lot to see. The official press release and exhibition announcement will be out by the end of the month, I think—so stay tuned!

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